Operating systems are the main software behind your phone, or computer. Android, Windows, and macOS are operating systems.
No company watching over you, no "big brother is watching you" nonsense. Just your desktop and you, with no big scary corporation stealing all your data.
It's super fast. So fast, that 100% of super computers use it. All Android phones use it too, and most servers keeping your websites, apps, and cat videos online are as well.
Fancy term time! Open Source means anyone is free to do whatever they want with Linux. You can copy and make your own version, change a few things and help out Linux, or really anything! It gives more power to you!
(Fun fact, that's why this website is called librehunt. Libre is derived from the Latin word for freedom, which is what Linux gives you.)
The actual term is "distro", as in your own distribution of Linux, but it just means that anyone can make their own Linux flavour by say, changing the theme, and putting different apps.
Some distros make it friendly for beginners, or something ultra-powerful, but scary looking, for super computers.
Just like Windows and Mac have a different desktop, or interface, Linux has many different ones too! Some distros have a desktop that's unique to the distro while others use ones that are common across multiple distributions.
That's alright, because I've made the second part of this website to help you choose which distro/Linux flavour to use!